Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

None of the students seems to know to the Chairman’s satisfaction what the dialogue is about. And so with mock sadness he says they must all read more thoroughly but this time he will help them by taking on the burden of explaining the dialogue himself. This provides an overwhelming relief to the tension he has so carefully built up and the entire class is in the palm of his hand.

The Chairman proceeds to reveal the meaning of the dialogue with complete attention. Phædrus listens with deep engagement.

After a time something begins to disengage him a little. A false note of some kind has crept in. At first he doesn’t see what it is, but then he becomes aware that the Chairman has completely bypassed Socrates’ description of the One and has jumped ahead to the allegory of the chariot and the horses.

In this allegory the seeker, trying to reach the One, is drawn by two horses, one white and noble and temperate, and the other surly, stubborn, passionate and black. The one is forever aiding him in his upward journey to the portals of heaven, the other is forever confounding him. The Chairman has not stated it yet, but he is at the point at which he must now announce that the white horse is temperate reason, the black horse is dark passion, emotion. He is at the point at which these must be described, but the false note suddenly becomes a chorus.

He backs up and restates that “Now Socrates has sworn to the Gods that he is telling the Truth. He has taken an oath to speak the Truth, and if what follows is not the Truth he has forfeited his own soul.”

TRAP! He’s using the dialogue to prove the holiness of reason! Once that’s established he can move down into enquiries of what reason is, and then, lo and behold, there we are in Aristotle’s domain again!

Phædrus raises his hand, palm flat out, elbow on the table. Where before this hand was shaking, it is now deadly calm. Phædrus senses that he now is formally signing his own death warrant here, but knows he will sign another kind of death warrant if he takes his hand down.

The Chairman sees the hand, is surprised and disturbed by it, but acknowledges it. Then the message is delivered.

Phædrus says, “All this is just an analogy.”

Silence. And then confusion appears on the Chairman’s face. “What?” he says. The spell of his performance is broken.

“This entire description of the chariot and horses is just an analogy.”

“What?” he says again, then loudly, “It is the truth! Socrates has sworn to the Gods that it is the truth!”

Phædrus replies, “Socrates himself says it is an analogy.”

“If you will read the dialogue you will find that Socrates specifically states it is the Truth!”

“Yes, but prior to that — in, I believe, two paragraphs — he has stated that it is an analogy.”

The text is on the table to consult but the Chairman has enough sense not to consult it. If he does and Phædrus is right, his classroom face is completely demolished. He has told the class no one has read the book thoroughly.

Rhetoric, 1; Dialectic, 0.

Fantastic, Phædrus thinks, that he should have remembered that. It just demolishes the whole dialectical position. That may just be the whole show right there. Of course it’s an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don’t know that. That’s why the Chairman missed that statement of Socrates. Phædrus has caught it and remembered it, because if Socrates hadn’t stated it he wouldn’t have been telling the “Truth.”

No one sees it yet, but they will soon enough. The Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods has just been shot down in his own classroom.

Now he is speechless. He can’t think of a word to say. The silence which so built his image at the beginning of the class is now destroying it. He doesn’t understand from where the shot has come. He has never confronted a living Sophist. Only dead ones.

Now he tries to grasp onto something, but there is nothing to grasp onto. His own momentum carries him forward into the abyss, and when he finally finds words they are the words of another kind of person; a schoolboy who has forgotten his lesson, has gotten it wrong, but would like our indulgence anyway.

He tries to bluff the class with the statement he made before that no one has studied very well, but the student to Phædrus’ right shakes his head at him. Obviously someone has.

The Chairman falters and hesitates, acts afraid of his class and does not really engage them. Phædrus wonders what the consequences of this will be.

Then he sees a bad thing happen. The beat-up innocent student who has watched him earlier now is no longer so innocent. He is sneering at the Chairman and asking him sarcastic and insinuating questions. The Chairman, already crippled, is now being killed — but then Phædrus realizes this was what was intended for himself.

He can’t feel sorry, just disgusted. When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.

A girl rescues the Chairman by asking easy questions. He receives the questions with gratitude, answers each at great length and slowly recovers himself.

Then the question is asked him, “What is dialectic?”

He thinks about it, and then, by God, turns to Phædrus and asks if he would care to answer.

“You mean my personal opinion?” Phædrus asks.

“No — let us say, Aristotle’s opinion.”

No subtleties now. He is just going to get Phædrus on his own territory and let him have it.

“As best I know — ” Phædrus says, and pauses.

“Yes?” The Chairman is all smiles. Everything is all set.

“As best I know, Aristotle’s opinion is that dialectic comes before everything else.”

The Chairman’s expression goes from unction to shock to rage in one-half second flat. It does! his face shouts, but he never says it. The trapper trapped again. He can’t kill Phædrus on a statement taken from his own article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Rhetoric, 2; Dialectic, 0.

“And from the dialectic come the forms”, Phædrus continues, “and from. — ” But the Chairman cuts it off. He sees it cannot go his way and dismisses it.

He shouldn’t have cut it off, Phædrus thinks to himself. Were he a real Truth-seeker and not a propagandist for a particular point of view he would not. He might learn something. Once it’s stated that “the dialectic comes before anything else”, this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity, subject to dialectical question.

Phædrus would have asked, What evidence do we have that the dialectical question-and-answer method of arriving at truth comes before anything else? We have none whatsoever. And when the statement is isolated and itself subject to scrutiny it becomes patently ridiculous. Here is this dialectic, like Newton’s law of gravity, just sitting by itself in the middle of nowhere, giving birth to the universe, hey? It’s asinine.

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

The class ends, the Chairman stands by the door answering questions, and Phædrus almost goes up to say something but does not. A lifetime of blows tends to make a person unenthusiastic about any unnecessary interchange that might lead to more. Nothing friendly has been said or even hinted at and much hostility has been shown.